Sue Townsend - The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year

60 pork sausages

2 kilos of onions

60 torpedo rolls

35 baking potatoes

a huge lump of Cheddar cheese

a slab of Heinz baked beans

30 novelty Guy Fawkes biscuits

a large bottle of Heinz tomato sauce

3 packs of butter

toffee-apple ingredients for 30

1 Guy Fawkes mask and hat

10 livestock-friendly Chinese lanterns

6 bottles of rosé wine

6 bottles of white wine

6 bottles of red wine

1 barrel of Kronenbourg

2 crates of John Smith’s.

She had hurt her back hefting the Kronenbourg from the trolley into the boot of the car.

On the way home she had spent almost £200 on two boxes of assorted fireworks, and sparklers for the children.

The afternoon was taken up dragging a damp mattress from the garage down the garden and manoeuvring it on to the small bonfire, constructing an effigy of Guy Fawkes, making toffee apples (including chopping kindling for toffee-apple sticks), cleaning the downstairs lavatory, vacuuming the sitting room, deep-cleaning the kitchen, selecting listener-friendly CDs and jet-washing the patio.

Brian had asked his guests to turn up at six, so Eva filled the oven with a first sitting of potatoes at five thirty, set out the cold food and the drinks, rinsed and dried the glassware, placed candles into windproof lanterns, and waited.

At seven ten the doorbell finally rang and Eva heard Brian’s voice saying, ‘Mrs Hordern, lovely to see you. Is this Mr Hordern?’ As he was taking their coats, he asked, ‘Have you come in a crowd? Are the others parking?’

She said, ‘No, we’ve come on us own.’

When they’d finally gone, Eva declared, ‘That was the most excruciating night of my life – and I include in that giving birth to the twins. What happened, Brian? Do your colleagues hate you that much?’

‘I can’t understand it,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps my notice fell off the board. I only used one drawing pin.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what must have happened. It was the drawing pin.’

Later, as they were sharing a second bottle of burgundy, Brian asked, ‘Did you notice, when I let off my Beaver Special rockets? Neither of them gave so much as an “ohhh” or an “ahhh”. They just sat there, filling their stupid faces with carbohydrates and grease! I spent seven days building those. At great risk to myself. I mean, I was working with unstable materials. At any moment I could have blown myself and the sheds to smithereens.’

Eva said, ‘They were very beautiful rockets, Brian.’ She felt genuinely sorry for him.

She had watched his face each time he launched a rocket. He was as excited as a child, and had followed each projectile’s trajectory and height with the look of a proud father watching his baby walk for the first time.

Now, Eva looked around her white room and thought, ‘But that was then and this is now. I have absolutely nothing to do but to watch light move across the sky.’

Eva had been in bed for seven weeks and had lost a stone in weight. Her skin was flaky and it seemed to her that she was losing too much hair.

Sometimes Brian would bring her tea and toast. He would hand it to her with a self-pitying sigh. On many occasions the tea was cold and the toast was underdone, but she would always thank him effusively.

She needed him.

On the mornings he forgot about her, or was too rushed to think about breakfast, she went hungry. By now it was against Eva’s own rules to keep food in the room. And the only drink she allowed herself was water.

One day, Ruby made an attempt to persuade Eva to drink a glass of sparking Lucozade, saying, ‘This’ll get you up and about. When I had pneumonia and were hovering between life and death – I were just at the mouth of the tunnel, I could see the light at the end -your dad came to visit me with a bottle of Lucozade. I took a sip and, well, I were like Frankenstein’s monster after lightning struck him. I got up from my bed and walked!’

Eva said, ‘So, it was nothing to do with the antibiotics they were pumping into you?’

‘No!’ Ruby snorted. ‘My consultant, Mr Briars, admitted that he was at his wits’ end. He’d tried everything, even prayer, to keep me from going down that tunnel.’

Eva said, ‘So, Mr Briars – who had trained for ten years, and given lectures and written numerous papers on pneumonia – had failed you? Whereas a few sips of a sparkling glucose drink brought you back to life?’

Ruby’s eyes were shining. ‘Yes! It were the Lucozade what done it!’

In the early days of Eva’s self-incarceration her mother-in-law, Yvonne, had cooked every other day. She was a plain, good meat and two veg cook who believed that a liberal application of Oxo gravy made every meal a gourmet feast. She was never suspicious of Eva’s clean plates, believing that Eva had, at last, given up her taste for silly foreign food and had happily reverted to the traditional English cooking that Yvonne excelled at.

Yvonne must never know that her food (cooked with bad grace and many martyred sighs, crashes of pottery and slammed-down saucepans) was given to a family of foxes who had taken up residence behind an overgrown laurel in Eva’s front garden. These outrageously confident creatures, bored of feeding on leftover risotto, taramasalata and suchlike from the authentically middle-class residents who were the majority in Eva’s road, fought over Yvonne’s chops and mince. It seemed that they too preferred traditional English food.

At about 7 p.m. on every Yvonne evening, Eva would go to the end of the bed and scrape her plate out of the open window She loved to see the foxes eating and licking their muzzles clean. Sometimes she even imagined that the vixen looked up at the house and saluted her in a gesture of female solidarity. But this was only Eva’s imagination.

Once, Yvonne had been mystified when she found a piece of liver and bacon on the porch, and one of her home-made faggots on the pavement outside Eva’s house.

One day, in mid-November, Alexander called in to see Eva on his way to a job.

He said, ‘Do you know you’re on your way to looking like a skeleton?’

‘I’m not on a diet,’ Eva said.

‘You need some good food inside you, food that you like. Write a list and I’ll sort it out with your husband.’

Eva enjoyed thinking about the food she truly liked. She had endless time in which to think, but eventually she came up with a surprisingly small and modest selection.

‘She’d soon get out of that bed if her arse was on fire,’ said Ruby to Brian. ‘You’re too soft with her.’

‘She frightens me,’ admitted Brian. ‘I used to look up from a book or from cutting a chop and she’d be looking at me.

They were walking around Morrisons with a trolley, selecting the ingredients for Brian’s evening meals. Brian had Eva’s list in his pocket.

‘She’s always had that look,’ said Ruby, pausing at the stir-fry section. ‘I’ve often fancied doing a stir-fry, but I haven’t got a wonk.’

Brian couldn’t be bothered to correct his mother-in-law. He wanted to concentrate on Eva and the reason why she wouldn’t leave what used to be called ‘their’ bed.

He wasn’t a bad husband, he thought. He’d never hit her, not hard. There had been a bit of pushing and shoving, and once – after he’d found a Valentine’s Day card she’d received and hidden behind the boiler that said:

‘Eva, leave him, come to me’ – he had dangled her upside down from the landing. It had been a joke, of course. True, he’d had trouble pulling her back over the balustrade, and at one point it had looked like he might drop her on to the tiles below. But there had been absolutely no need for Eva to scream as loudly as she did. It was pure exhibitionism.